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Owner of PageF30.com.
Translator of Demian by Hermann Hesse into English - an interlinear translation for German students and those who want to see the original text.
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/mithradates
Fluent in Japanese, Korean. Proficient in Mandarin, Turkish, German, French, Portuguese, others.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

A while back I mentioned this Swiss site as a good one for podcasts with matching audio: the site has podcasts around the B1 level (intermediate) in a number of languages: not just German, French and Italian, but also Spanish and English. (Of course European Portuguese is nowhere to be found, sad...)

One of the German podcasts is Swiss German. I noticed this before, but upon taking a closer look today it turns out that it's both the same text and speaker as the German one, meaning that instead of reading Swiss German spelled phonetically, you get to hear a German text as spoken in Swiss German.

One example: this episode in Hochdeutsch (albeit with a Swiss accent), and the same one in Swiss German. Just making a few notes from the beginning (just writing haphazardly as it sounds to my ears) we see a great many differences:

(I'm sure Olivier will know the standardized orthography or have an interesting comment to make here)

So how useful is it to know Swiss German in Switzerland? Besides simply knowing it to understand people when they talk amongst themselves, a recent post goes over how much it is used at work: Swiss German is used about two thirds of the time both at home and work, while Hochdeutsch is hardly used at home (9.6%) but shoots up to 32.3% in the workplace.